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Comment by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK | Hacker News Reader

You can buy it cheaper on Aliexpress, but it will take several weeks, and everyone wants instant gratification. That's the entire business model of majority of Amazon sellers - buy on Aliexpress/baba - sell at Amazon at a markup.

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Sometimes producers (RIP MPOW) also directly lists on Amazon, so you pay a small premium for fast shipping from local warehouses, and get pretty decent unofficial warranty - they know Q&A on low margin items lacking, high defect rate likely - will often replaced items no question asks on 1star review with offer to change back to 5 stars to (justifiably) gush about how painless RMA process is. Sometimes they even give you the shady gift card. Much better experience than aliexpress.

That's improving too. Now, very often you can get 15 day delivery on orders over €10 (or the equivalent in your local currency).

Not instant, but often quite manageable.

Isn't that the entire model of most retail stores? Namely that they are retail and have items available for reasonably fast shipping.

The business model of retail stores is that they will deal with individual products, individual users, and small geographic areas in exchange for a share of the profits.

Yes they have a job title called “buyer” whose job it is to find goods that the store should sell, including quality and safety (varies by store!).

If you shop Amazon for electronic components (LEDs, resistors, etc.) you can find listing that have 3+ weeks delivery times. Not all, but they are in there. Literal drop ship from China, absolutely no reason to buy on Amazon instead of aliexpress/banggood

Most a-li-express products are getting delivered within two to three weeks these days. They have become very efficient in logistics.

Also if you continue supporting Chinese sellers on Amazon, this would still encourage these behaviors.

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